The prolific Northern Irish/Scottish filmmaker and writer Mark Cousins (The Story of Film, The Story of Looking, etc.) had the world premiere of his latest work, the documentary feature A Sudden Glimpse into Deeper Things (focused on the activity and life of the British abstract painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham), in the Crystal Globe Competition of the 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (28 June – 6 July 2024). I seized the opportunity to ask him a few questions.

Q: When, in 2022, you created and premiered the Like a Huge Scotland immersive art installation in Edinburgh, did you consider that piece as a first stage towards the film on Wilhelmina Barns-Graham that you are launching now in Karlovy Vary?

A: In fact, I had started filming before that installation. I started filming quite a long time ago, nearly four years ago, because I just loved her work and wanted to do something. However, the idea of an installation came along as I was filming. Some of her pictures are quite small, so I thought I could film them with an 8K camera and magnify them hugely. I’m very interested in the scale of things. She was painting the Alps, but turned them into quite small pictures. So, I thought what if I make them big again and magnify her art?

Q: Have you designed the style of your film pondering the unusual associations made by artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in her paintings, writings, and notebooks?

A: I think that her style and my style are quite similar in a way; that’s what attracted me to her. She doesn’t look at the obvious things, she looks at different aspects. She doesn’t look at the top of the Alps, but looks at what’s beneath her feet. In my work, I’ve tried to be a bit similar, to change the perspective. I don’t think I wanted to copy or reflect her style in the film. What I did want to do was have a sense of an encounter between her brain, her remarkable brain, and the Alps. She was totally inspired by the Alps and I was totally inspired by her. So, I think that is the echo. Her inspiration inspired my inspiration. And I hope that the audience will follow afterwards.  

Q: How have you decided to structure the film around that moment in May 1949 when Wilhelmina Barns-Graham climbed to the top of the Grindelwald glacier in Switzerland? It’s at the centre of your film…

A: I think it was the centre of her life, and that’s why it’s the centre of the film. She was unhealthy, had lung problems, so she wasn’t this natural personal who would climb the Alps. That climb was something epic, it was almost like a pilgrimage to her. So, I think it was the central thing, given that she painted it for more than 50 years. So, I thought to put it at the centre of the film and have that as a physical experience, and afterwards look at the implications of that day, that afternoon. I’m really interested in the chance that a moment can change your life. When we go out after this conversation, something could happen to you and me which profoundly changes us. I’m fascinated by that. Obviously, bad things can happen, we can get hit by a bus, for example. But sometimes the opposite can happen. In India, the word darshan means that suddenly a curtain is drawn back, and we glimpse the divine. I think I’m really interested in that. I’m not a religious person, but I am interested in moments when suddenly you think: “My Goodness, my God, I’ve never seen that or thought about that”. Some things can do this to us. And the Alps did this to Wilhelmina.

Q: In the split-screen dialogue between young Willie and older Willie, the former asks the latter to describe her epiphany from 1949; the more experienced artist answers that she has already described it in her paintings. Can film as a medium describe an epiphany better than painting?

A: Oh, that’s a good question. I think the answer is yes. First, cinema is bigger than paintings; there are not many paintings as big as a movie screen. Second, cinema has more spaces in it, between the image and the music and the sound effects, so we feel more enveloped and circled by a movie, a bit like you feel encircled by the Alps. So, yes, I think cinema is the best art form to describe and recreate an epiphany.

Q: When discussing Willie’s childhood and her harsh father, you insert a short fragment from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 noir thriller Shadow of a Doubt. What are your thoughts about the practice of including sequences extracted from fiction films in documentary works?

A: I like the unexpected, such as bricolage, to use the French word, when you put something from another world or another art form into this. I love doing that because it’s unexpected. We’ve often been told about difficult fathers who imprison their children. I used that little moment of Joseph Cotten from Shadow of a Doubt, when he looks at the camera, and then we cut to Teresa Wright. I thought that could be a more poetic way of describing the feeling of a father being threatening.

Q: Therefore, the viewers tend to identify Willie with Teresa Wright…

A: Yes, I guess so. I met Teresa Wright in real life. She was a lovely woman. I think that cinema is in the world like sunsets, trees, pizzas, etc. It’s another thing to use in our means of expression. So, why not use a clip from Hitchcock to tell us something about her life? I would like to say something else here. One of my previous films was about Alfred Hitchcock (My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, 2022), and what I wanted to say is that he was a visionary. What I’m saying with this film about Wilhelmina Barns-Graham is that she was a visionary. I actually think she was as great a visionary as Alfred Hitchcock.

Q: Why have you decided to have an actress play Willie in the reenactment of the glacier moment?

A: I don’t usually do reenactments, but I wanted to climb there and to get a sense of the physical presence, since the actress is wearing the same clothes as she wore, has the same height, the same hair, etc. I wanted to gain a sense of this moment, the fragility of this woman in this epic landscape. Also, Tilda Swinton does her voice. And Tilda comes from a very similar part of Scotland as Wilhelmina does. So, we got two points of view: Willie the actress and Tilda Swinton.

Q: In the film, you incidentally mention that in the 1950s, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham met Romanian artist Constantin Brâncuși in Paris. Do you believe that the meeting influenced her subsequent art in any way?

A: I do think so. I believe she was hungry for other artistic encounters. She came from quite a bourgeois background, where there wasn’t a lot of art, so to go to Europe and to meet other artists was exciting, particularly with Brâncuși. I think she was interested in his form. He was a formalist in some way. He wasn’t a particular storyteller, or an artist focused only on social things. He was interested in exploring form, and the shape of the world itself. That excited her about him. She went to Paris at other times as well, because she was intoxicated by the Paris art scene. She wasn’t so interested in cities, such as Paris itself. She didn’t really paint there. But she was interested in the artistic scene in Paris. She also went to Italy, where she saw all the landforms, mud and clay, and became excited. At the same time, she was very hungry and even in her late 80s and 90s, she was still passionately meeting artists to explore form. That really is an attractive quality in somebody, the life force in this woman.

Q: You are not only a filmmaker tracing the history of cinema, but also an observer of recent trends in world cinema. How do you perceive the evolution of Romanian cinema?

A: Romanian cinema has been up and down, but I think that it has led the way. I was there at the world premiere of The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005), and I was interested in earlier Romanian cinema, like from the 1950s and 1960s. To see Lăzărescu, I think on the last day of the Cannes Festival, was astonishing. I have to say that Radu Jude is one of the greatest living filmmakers. I think that his “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” (2018) is a masterpiece, and one of the greatest films about antisemitism I have ever seen. It is also Godardian, of course, because one of the people in some of those scenes could be Jean-Pierre Léaud. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) was great, as was his new film, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023). Radu has absorbed the lessons of Godard and Chris Marker, as well as all sorts of other lessons from popular culture and social media. So, I think he is leading the way. What we should say as well is that Romanian cinema needs more government support, because it’s not easy. So, your government needs to be proud of Romanian filmmakers, proud of the fact that the world is looking at Romanian cinema and thinking: “Whoa!”, and passionately support them, both in production, funding, and in exhibition, cinemas, distribution. The government should be proud of this cinema which is a major aspect of Romanian visibility worldwide and support it.